Using Firebase

Firebase Database is a popular NoSQL cloud database that allows developers realtime synchronization of live data. With multi-platform support, synchronizing data between users and clients is pretty seamless, but it can also be used more generally as a generic persistent NoSQL data backing if you don't care about realtime updates. It has a very flexible rules syntax to allow minute control over data access as well.

Luckily, the Firebase JavaScript SDK starting from version 3.1+ has almost full support for React Native, so adding it to our Expo app is super easy. The one caveat covered later in this guide is that the user login components typically provided by the Firebase SDKs will not work for React Native, and thus we will have to work around it.

Note: This guide only covers Firebase Realtime Database, and not the other services under the larger Google Firebase umbrella. Firebase Cloud Storage is currently not supported, but we are working on upstreaming a Blob implementation to React Native that would make this possible. For more background on why other Firebase services are not supported, please read Brent Vatne's response on Canny

1. Firebase SDK Setup

First we need to setup a Firebase Account and create a new project. We will be using the JavaScript SDK provided by Firebase, so pull it into your Expo project.

npm install --save firebase.

The Firebase console will provide you with an api key, and other identifiers for your project needed for initialization. firebase-web-start has a detailed description of what each field means and where to find them in your console.

Temporarily Bypass Default Security Rules

By default Firebase Database has a security rule setup such that all devices accessing your data must be authenticated. We obviously haven't setup any authentication yet, so we can disable it for now while we setup the rest of our app.

Go into the Firebase console for Database, and under the Rules tab you should see a default set of rules already provided for you. Change the rules to:

Note It is important to note that this is temporary for development, and these rules should be thoroughly assessed before releasing an application.

2. Storing Data and Receiving Updates

Storing data through Firebase can be pretty simple. Imagine we're creating a game where highscores are stored in Firebase for everyone to see. We could create a users bucket in our data that is referenced by each user. Setting their highscore would be straightforward.

Now let's say we wanted another client to listen to updates to the high score of a specific user. Firebase allows us to set a listener on a specific data reference and get notified each time there is an update to the data. In the example below, every time a highscore is updated for the given user, it will print it to console.

3. User Authentication

This was all pretty simple and works fairly out of the box for what Firebase JavaScript SDK provides. There is one caveat however. We skipped the authentication rules for simplicity at the beginning. Firebase SDKs provide authentication methods for developers, so they don't have to reimplement common login systems such as Google or Facebook login.

This includes UI elements in the Web, Android, and iOS SDK versions for Firebase, however, these UI components do not work with React Native and should not be called. Thankfully, Firebase gives us ways to authenticate our data access given that we provide user authentication ourselves.

Login Methods

We can choose different login methods that make sense to our application. The login method choice is orthogonal to the Firebase Database access, however, we do need to let Firebase know how we have setup our login system such that it can correctly assign authentication tokens that match our user accounts for data access control. You can use anything you want, roll your own custom login system, or even forego it altogether if all your users can have unrestricted access.

Facebook Login

A common login system many developers opt for is a simple Facebook login that users are already familiar with. Expo provides a great Facebook login component already, so we just need to plug that in.

See the Facebook section of our docs for information on how to set this up. This works just as well with Google and several others.

Tying Sign-In Providers with Firebase

Once you have added Facebook login to your Expo app, we need to adjust the Firebase console to check for it. Under the Authentication section in the console in the Sign-In Method tab, enable Facebook as a sign-in provider.

You can add whichever provider makes sense for you, or even add multiple providers. We will stick with Facebook for now since we already have a simple drop-in Expo component already built.

Reenable Data Access Security Rule

We need to re-enable the Data Security Rule in our Firebase console again to check for user authentication. This time our rules will be slightly more complicated.

For our example, let's say we want everyone to be able to read the high score for any user, but we want to restrict writes to only the user who the score belongs to. You wouldn't want anyone overwriting your highscore, would you?

The Facebook login method is similar to what you see in the Facebook login guide, however, the token we receive from a successful login can be passed to the Firebase SDK to provide us with a Firebase credential via firebase.auth.FacebookAuthProvider.credential. We can then sign-in with this credential via firebase.auth().signInWithCredential.

The firebase.auth().onAuthStateChanged event allows us to set a listener when the authentication state has changed, so in our case, when the Facebook credential is used to successfully sign in to Firebase, we are given a user object that can be used for authenticated data access.

Authenticated Data Updates

Now that we have a user object for our authenticated user, we can adapt our previous storeHighScore() method to use the uid of the user object as our user reference. Since the user.uid's are generated by Firebase automatically for authenticated users, this is a good way to reference our users bucket.